New Student Wellness Center Underway at the University of Chicago

CHICAGO, IL – Construction on the new Student Wellness Center at the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus has begun. Scheduled for completion in fall 2020, the new center will create a single, integrated facility for the university’s student health, counseling, and wellness resources.

University of Chicago

The 30,000-square-foot project includes the ground floor renovation of a portion of the historic building that currently houses the school’s student health clinic, known as the Lying-In Hospital, along with the construction of a new modern glass addition infilling an existing courtyard that will accommodate student counseling and health promotion services, both of which are relocating from separate campus locations. The new center will also provide a dedicated student entrance for greater ease of access.

The multi-story Lying-In Hospital building was designed in the late 1920s by Schmidt, Garden & Erickson in a Collegiate Gothic style. The project will capture the highly detailed limestone facades of the courtyard within the modern interior of the new infill addition. The gothic stone masonry will be on display by constituting the perimeter circulation walls of the main corridors. Continuous overhead skylights will bring abundant natural light into these passages, celebrating the building’s craftsmanship and continuity between old and new.

Working with an aggressive timeline, Wight & Company will complete the first phase of the project by spring 2020. The firm is partnering with GMA Construction, a veteran- and minority-owned firm based on Chicago’s South Side.

Featured

  • Opportunity by Design Framework

    Opportunity by Design

    Educational improvement efforts often focus on curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional development, and intervention systems while treating the physical school building as background. But school design is not a passive backdrop to learning — it is a structural lever for equity.

  • Minnesota District Opens New PreK–12 School

    Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop Schools in Gibbon, Minn., recently announced that construction is complete on a new, $68.9-million school for students in grades PreK–12, according to a news release.

  • How Proactive Maintenance Can Transform Athletic Facilities into Strategic Assets for College Sports

    College athletics is entering one of the most transformative periods in its history. With NIL reshaping financial models and competitive expectations, athletic departments across the country are being asked to do more than ever with increasingly constrained resources.

  • Virginia Tech Tops Out New College of Engineering Building

    Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., recently celebrated the topping out of Mitchell Hall, which will soon stand as the largest College of Engineering building on campus, according to a news release. The university partnered with Skanska on the 285,500-square-foot facility, which has an expected completion date of winter 2028.